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Customer Onboarding: A Process Calling Out for Video

Posted by Andrea Keating on February 17, 2017

Closing a sale for a brand-new customer is thrilling, but it’s important to understand that this is the point where your job really begins. You have to ensure that the product is delivered as expected, but you also need to make sure that they receive all the support they need to make the most out of it. Taking the time to deliver an exceptional customer onboarding process provides significant benefits to your company:

• Keeping the sale. Providing strong post-sales support ensures that you don’t lose as many sales due to returns. If a customer buys your product and then isn’t quite sure where to go next, they might simply return it instead of reaching out for support.
• Keeping customers coming back for more. Repeat customers are less expensive to maintain and generate a great deal of revenue. If you can thrill customers when they first come on board with your company, there’s a good chance that they’ll come back over and over again.
• Encouraging referrals. Surprisingly, word of mouth is directly involved in an estimated 20 to 50% of all purchases. By properly onboarding your customers and further building your relationship you’re giving them even more reasons to spread the good word and refer you to their friends, family, and colleagues.

When it comes to customer onboarding, nothing is more effective than video content. With the right videos, you’ll be able to bring your customers up to speed quickly, giving them the information they need without requiring dedicated, hands-on attention. To help you get started using video in your onboarding process, here’s everything you need to know about how onboarding works, and where video content can assist you:

The Basics of Customer Onboarding

As you onboard your customer, there are different areas you’ll want to focus on in order to provide a smooth transition:

Training

A good training program takes your customers from opening the box to having a strong, complete understanding of your product. Keeping it digitalized and available is important since on average people will forget 75% of everything they learn within a day and 90% of everything they learn within a week. Your goal is to create training materials that not only give them the ability to hit the ground running but also provide a safety net so they can go over anything that they forget or don’t assimilate to start.  This is where video is ideal, as it gives you the opportunity for on-demand training while incorporating brand and features messaging.

Customer Support

As somebody uses your product for the first time, they might have some technical issues. If you’re providing software or an application, for example, you should include information about how to install and get started, or what systems you are compatible with. This should also include answers to the most frequently asked questions you receive from new customers. Not only will these reduce your customer service load and make the user experience better, but you can tag them with search-friendly terms to enhance your SEO efforts.

Using Video to Improve Onboarding

Now that we know exactly how important customer onboarding is and what it should entail, it’s time to take a look at how video specifically fits into the equation.

One great way to use videos to improve your onboarding process is by creating strong product demos. These can be used to grab a customer’s attention and give them the most important information about your product – sort of like an interactive product manual. A video makes it much easier for users to follow along and see some of the most beneficial features of your product in action.

Here are some other great ways that you can use video to help with customer onboarding:

• Introduce the team. It’s a good idea to remind your new customers that there’s a whole team of people ready to help them. Help them meet the people that will be working with them during implementation or onboarding with a quick introduction video to make it a little more personable and welcoming.
• Record training sessions. When a salesperson or engineer is hosting a video conference to train a new customer, see if you can get permission to record it. The odds are good that at least one question or scenario will come up that could be of use to other customers. You might even want to have somebody host a generic session for multiple new users, record the entire thing and make it available new users in the future.
• Let other customers help. Sometimes, your team knows your products so well it’s hard to pull the curtain back and look at a brand-new user’s perspective. Let other users who were able to use your product to great success go over some tips that helped them when they were first starting out. They might even show you ways to use your product you never thought of before!

Recording training sessions is a simple way to generate useful onboarding content without going out of your way.

Creating an effective customer onboarding program takes time, but the effort is well-worth it. By leveraging video content, you’ll be able to automate much of the process while also making it user-friendly and accessible. Once you’re done putting your strategy together, make sure to reach out to us here at Crews Control. We’ll help you find the perfect video crew for your customer onboarding project, no matter what types of videos you’re shooting, how many of them you have, or where in the world you need it done. To get started all you have to do is click here for a free quote!